


Haven

by luna_libertatis



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016), Pre-Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-04 19:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21203174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna_libertatis/pseuds/luna_libertatis
Summary: Crowe survives the night before the day she meets Libertus."She was brought up an orphan. Run out of her village. I still remember the first time I saw her. Scrawny little thing, all covered in dirt. Not a friend in the world. But those eyes... Damn. There was something about those eyes."





	Haven

Crowe had been a light sleeper all her life, so the sputtering hiss of a hydraulic door above the building woke her almost instantly. She rolled off her cot and onto the floor at almost the same time the first MT boots landed in the village square beneath their dropship.

Then the gunfire started. Then the screaming. 

Crowe stayed under the bed, hugging her knees up to her chest, and waited for someone to come for her. But no one came. Soon she smelled smoke and realized that the orphanage must be on fire. Her choice was to stay put and definitely die, or get outside and maybe die. She scooted out from under the bed and went out into the hall. The air was full of smoke and the screams of terrified children. Crowe started coughing as she made her way down the hall, her eyes stinging, and nearly fell when her bare foot ran into something lying across the width of the hallway. It was the matron of the orphanage, her eyes open and sightless, her belly all covered in blood. Crowe had to step over her in order to get past and get outside.

The village square was in chaos. Even though it was after midnight, the number of buildings on fire made it almost as bright as midday. Crowe saw bodies lying in the street, some on top of each other; people were screaming in fear and moaning in agony. Gunfire was coming from everywhere at once. She picked a direction and ran. Everyone who still _ could _ run was running toward the outskirts of the village. An adult knocked into her and sent her sprawling into the dirt, but she picked herself up and kept running. She knew that it wasn't safe at night out in the wilderness beyond the village, that there were beasts and daemons lurking in the tall grass and the shadows. But she also knew that there was a haven less than a mile to the east, and the protective power of those runes still burned bright. If she could make it there, she might be safe. 

Crowe could see several other shadowy figures around her running into the scrublands, crashing through the vegetation in their panic. Almost immediately the daemons came –perhaps drawn by the blood, or the noise– and once again there were screams all around her. Fighting every instinct that was telling her to panic and run, instead Crowe stopped and crouched down, making herself as small as she could. She quieted her breathing, and tried to listen for any signs of movement coming towards her as her eyes adjusted more to the pitch blackness. She stared straight down at her bare toes in the dirt as the shrieks in the night turned into choked gurgles, and then into silence. Once it was quiet for a few minutes, save for the dull roar of the fire behind her, Crowe carefully stood up and slowly made her way through the darkness. She forced herself to walk slowly, to make as little noise as possible, but when the glow of the haven become visible in front of her, the relief was so sharp that she started running again.

That turned out to be a mistake.

The ground erupted with inhuman howling as daemons emerged, alerted to her presence. Crowe had no choice but to keep running, but on the threshold of the haven she tripped and started to fall. She managed to catch herself at the last second, grabbing at a stone that jutted up from the earth. The stone was marbled with icy blue veins that seemed to glow softly, and as soon as she touched it she jerked her hands back with a slight cry and fell to the ground. Her hands were so cold so suddenly that they felt like they were burning, and it knocked the wind out of her as the blue light faded from the stone. Her only thought was that she had to get up onto the haven, she would crawl if she had to, but her hands were too numb to push herself back up, and before she could even get up to her knees she saw the shadow of a daemon leaping towards her.

Crowe fell onto her back, raised her arms to shield her face, and screamed. Her breath was a misty cloud, and the icy sensation ripped back down her arms, stinging her numbed hands. She waited for the weight of the daemeon's body to land on her, for its claws to rake her body. But nothing happened. Crowe lowered her arms and managed to sit up, scooting back to press her back into the dormant stone. A wide swath of grass and plants spreading out in front of her were now glittering with thick frost, surrounding the crumpled, frozen corpse of a daemon just a few feet away. Before any other daemons could approach, Crowe scuttled up onto the haven proper, sitting in the center of the protective, glowing runes. When she caught her breath again she looked down at her hands: they were scraped up, and filthy, and there were wisps of mist still coming off her fingertips. She rubbed them absently against her pajama bottoms.

The daemons howled just beyond the stones, and the village burned long into the night, and no one else ever made it to the haven.

*****

Crowe didn’t remember falling asleep, but she woke up hours later. She was curled up into a ball, with her spindly arms wrapped tight around her legs. It was freezing cold and the rock beneath her felt like a block of ice. The sky was a dingy gray, peppered with fading stars, so it must have been close to dawn. She didn’t see any dropships, and immanent daybreak had sent the daemons back to wherever it was they came from. She was alone. 

There was likely no one left in her village and the nearest town was too far for her to make it on foot. Maybe the Niffs had killed them all in the night, too. Maybe there was no one else left. As she thought about what to do, Crowe caught sight of an adolescent coeurl weaving through the scrubland a few hundred yards away. Coeurls were not above scavenging, and Crowe didn’t want to think too hard about what had drawn the creature so close. 

She peered over the side of the haven and saw the patch of dead and blackened plants emanating out from the Ice deposit. It was real; it had really happened! Crowe knew that the King in the crown city had magic powers, but she had never heard of just an ordinary person using magic. She looked back down at her hands and remembered the sensation of intense cold that shot along her bones when she’d touched the stone. She cupped her hands together and closed her eyes, as she imagined the veins of glowing blue magic were running along her arms, instead of the stones.

When she opened her eyes, she held a small pile of ice shards in her palms. She shoved them into her mouth and let them melt on her tongue, doing a little to help slake her thirst. She rubbed her cool, damp hands over her face, which probably didn’t do much but smear more dirt and grime around, but she felt a little better. When she looked out over the scrubland again, she could no longer see the coeurl where she’d last seen it poking around. Wary of not knowing exactly where this predator was, she scanned around the haven and found it again crouched down in the grass a few hundred feet away. Watching her. Crowe’s heart leapt into her throat on instinct, but then she remembered that she wasn’t so defenseless anymore. She had survived the Niffs. She had survived the daemons. She would not be killed by a cat.

_ “Fire,” _ she thought. _ “Coeurls don’t like fire.” _

Crowe knew that other elemental deposits should be nearby; if she’d been able to accidentally draw in some Ice, maybe she could intentionally draw in some Fire. She spied the orange glow of the deposit just a few feet away from the haven, and she slowly eased her way towards it, all while keeping her eyes fixed on the coeurl. It kept track of her with its gaze, its tail and whiskers twitching slightly, but it didn’t move.

The Fire deposit glowed like a hot ember, but it was cool to the touch under her hand. Nothing happened at first, so she concentrated on drawing the magic up into her, as if her arm was a straw, and after a moment she was able to coax it out. A steady, molten heat flowed into the marrow of her bones, and settled there, and Crowe no longer felt cold. She looked up and saw that while she’d been distracted, drawing in the magic, the coeurl had begun slowly advancing toward her. She planted her feet and yelled “NO!” flicking her hands as if shooing away a house cat. Sparks flew off her fingertips. She shook her hands again and they were briefly engulfed in flame, causing her to shriek and the coeurl to abruptly halt. Crowe climbed back up onto the haven and, perhaps deciding that less troublesome meals could be found elsewhere, the coeurl turned away from the haven and headed off in the direction of the river.

Crowe sat down again, and watched as the smoke rising from her village slowly smudged across the sky. She didn’t know what to do besides wait, so she filled the time thinking about what she would have done to the Niffs if she’d had this power last night. A short while later she heard the sound of vehicles approaching in the distance and saw a caravan of several trucks coming from the south, heading in her direction. This wasn’t Niffs, they were clearly Galadhians. It must be a rescue party. Crowe stood up, and waved an arm, and one of the trucks broke off from the rest and veered toward the haven. She waited, the wind whipping at her hair and making the fabric of her loose pajamas flutter. 

As soon as the driver pulled to a stop the door swung open and a stocky teenage boy bounded out and up onto the haven. He looked only a few years older than her; he had probably only just learned to drive that truck. Crowe took an instinctive step backward; life at the orphanage had taught her that boys were often rough and mean, to be avoided if possible.

_ “I’m ok, now,” _ she thought to herself_. “I have the Fire in me.” _

“Hey, are you ok?” the boy asked as he looked around. “Are you here by yourself?”

Crowe nodded.

“Hey. I’m Libertus. We’re from Corbenic,” he pointed back in the direction the trucks had come from, “we came as soon as we heard about the Niffs...” he trailed off as he looked back at her, into her eyes, seemingly losing his train of thought. Self-consciously she wrapped her arms around herself, and Libertus snapped out of it. “Six, you’re probably freezing!” he yelped as he shucked off his jacket and handed it to her. Crowe took the jacket gratefully and slipped it on over her filthy pajamas; it totally enveloped her from neck to mid-thigh. 

“Thanks.” 

Libertus squatted down in front of her and rolled up the cuffs of the jacket so that they sat above her wrists. “There, that’s better. So, what’s your name?”

“Crowe.”

“Ok, Crowe. How about let’s get you out of here.”

Libertus helped her down from the haven, even offering to carry her since she was barefoot, which she refused. Once they were in the truck, he cranked up the heat and reached over to open up the vents and direct them all towards her. 

“So, your family…?” Crowe shook her head. “Sorry.”

She looked down at her lap. “No, that was a long time ago.”

“Oh.” They sat in silence for a moment. “So, is there anyone…_ there _…?”

Unbidden, Crowe remembered the lifeless eyes of the orphanage matron, on the floor with a Niff bullet in her belly. “No.” 

Libertus sighed and nodded as he started to drive over to join the rest of the rescue party. Crowe kept her eyes down so that she didn’t have to see what was on the ground outside the windows. 

“I’ll ask Pa if we can go ahead and head back to town,” Libertus said, filling the silence. “We’ll get you some clothes, some proper food...” Crowe pulled her feet up onto the seat, curling up, tucking her knees under her chin. Libertus looked over and flashed a reassuring smile. “It’ll be ok, Crowe, I promise. I’ll look out for ya.”

Strangely, Crowe thought, he sounded like he actually meant it. And as Libertus drove onward she found herself wondering what it would feel like to believe him.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for "For Hearth & Home: A Kingsglaive Zine," but edited and slightly expanded for AO3.
> 
> I chose Corbenic for the name of Libertus' town because "Galahd" may be derived from the name Galahad, one of King Arthur's knights, and Galahad's birthplace was a castle named Corbenic.


End file.
